Thursday, November 14, 2013

Comanche (United Artists, 1956)

Formulaic but not at all bad

I was
always rather a Dana fan. Mr. Andrews was in 14 Westerns and was usually quite
good, in a reserved, Joel McCrea-ish way. After being third-billed in a Cisco Kid
movie in 1940 he was third again as Capt. Frémont in the fun farrago Kit Carson. He had a small part on the wonderful
William Wyler-directed The Westerner
with Gary Cooper and with Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean, and he was third billed
yet again in the Randolph Scott/Gene Tierney movie Belle Starr. He was one of the innocents hanged in The Ox-Bow Incident in ’43, then came probably his finest hour as
the star of the excellent Canyon Passage,
directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1946. I also thought he was good in Smoke Signal. Comanche was his tenth oater. He plays a resourceful and wise
scout who wants to make peace with the Comanche. It is one of those many 1950s sub-Broken Arrow quite pro-Indian Westerns.

OK, Henry, freeze for the still.

Not moving a muscle, Dana.

His old-timer
semi-humorous sidekick is Nestor Paiva. Nestor’s parents were Portuguese
immigrants and he was wheeled on to play any kind of ethnic part, whatever was
needed. He was in 56 Westerns and any number of TV shows but I remember him as
Curley in the excellent Ramrod and
Pete Maxwell in The Left-Handed Gun. In
Comanche he is a scruffy, buckskin-clad
scout called Puffer. His children are in it too, as ‘Young girl killed by
Indians’ and ‘Young boy killed by Indians’. Well, you have to start somewhere. There’s a film-long bit of ‘business’
with a wig that Dana buys him to cover his bald pate, which the Comanches fear
as a removable scalp. The part could easily have been taken by Walter Brennan
or Gabby Hayes but Nestor does a good job.

Nestor, Linda, Dana

It’s a
nice picture visually, filmed in Durango (muchas gracias in the credits to the
Mexican government, you know how they do) and there are loads of sweeping vistas and a huge
cast of extras. I don’t know where they got so many Comanches. Either they were
paid very little each or UA had a blooming big budget. It was shot by Jorge
Stahl Jr., who had done the photographically outstanding Garden of Evil, also shot in Mexico, with Gary Cooper and Richard
Widmark.

It’s a
formulaic plot of noble scout, skullduggery from a scalphunter (Stacy
Harris, the eye-patched henchman in The Great Sioux Uprising), a politician who, surprise, surprise, is bigoted, conniving and foolish all at the same
time (Lowell Gilmore), a statesmanlike mighty Indian chief, Quanah Parker (Kent Smith,
in his first Western) as counterpart to Dana, and the obligatory hothead Indian
who’s all for war, Black Cloud - Henry Brandon. Brandon was a Berlin-born American who specialized
in Indians, maybe because of his slightly angular face. He was of course Scar for
John Ford in The Searchers earlier the
same year and was promoted from Black Cloud to Quanah Parker for Ford in Two Rode Together in ’61.

Henry Brandon as angry hothead Black Cloud

We also
have an appearance from General Nelson A Miles, this time impersonated by John
Litel. Litel used to pop up in all those Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn Westerns like Dodge City, Virginia City andSanta Fe Trail. General Miles was quite
a regular in Indian Westerns over the years. Stephen Chase, Stafford Morgan,
George Kennedy, Kevin Tighe and Shaun Johnston have all played him. Actually
Kent Smith, this film's Quanah, changed sides and played him twice.

General Nelson A Miles

John Litel as Miles. What, no mustache?

Massachusetts-born Miles entered the Union Army in the Civil War aged 22 in 1861 as a volunteer and was a full colonel by 1862. He was a much-wounded hero of Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, received the Medal of Honor for gallantry at Chancellorsville and finished the war a major-general. After the war he was appointed a colonel in the regular Army, married Sherman's niece and played a leading role in nearly all of the Army's campaigns against the American Indian tribes of the Great Plains. He was a shrewd political operator. In 1874-1875, he was a field commander in the force that defeated the Kiowa, Comanche, and the Southern Cheyenne along the Red River. Later he replaced Crook as Army commander in the fight against Geronimo. By 1890 he was Brigadier-General Miles again and was commander at the time of the massacre at Wounded Knee, though not directly involved and critical of the commanding officer there. He was Commanding General of the United States Army at the time of the Spanish-American War and personally led the invasion of Puerto Rico. Aged 77, he offered to serve in the First World War but his offer was declined. He died in 1925. It was quite a career.There has
to be a beautiful dame, of course, and it’s the American debut of ‘Miss Linda
Cristal’, as she is billed (unusually, only billed tenth). She was to appear in
such epic Westerns as The Last of the
Fast Guns and The Fiend Who Walked
the West. Her high point was as Elena in Two Rode Together. She was very beautiful and being Argentinian
spoke English with a lovely Spanish accent. She and Dana fall in love, natch.

There’s
a title song with the chorus ‘A man is as good as his word/As good as his word
is he/If a man is as good as his word/He’s good enough for me’. This has a
catchy tune and theater audiences would have enjoyed it if they had been
tone-deaf morons.

The
trouble is that this ditty is endlessly repeated, with even more banal words, and if
that weren’t bad enough, the score does orchestral variations on this drivel
till you are close to screaming. The music (Herschel Burke Gilbert) is intrusive and distracting.

Some of
the writing is rather good, though. The first scene, when a storekeeper sells a
doll to a smiling mother with the recommendation that the doll’s hair is made
from real Comanche scalps (the mother benignly gives the doll to her little girl)
is particularly effective. Elsewhere, there is some attempt to stick to
historical fact. Of course a lot of it is bunkum, as you know it will be when
you see on the opening screen, ‘Most of the characters, places, dates and
events in this story are factual’. That “most of” lets them off the hook, I
guess. But they do try. It was writer Carl Krueger’s only Western and he didn’t
do a bad job at all.

"Most of..."

It’s
supposed to be 1878 but by then Quanah (unknown birth date, died 1911) was no
mighty warring chief. He had
surrendered in 1875 and with Colonel Mackenzie and Indian Agent James M.
Hayworth, he helped settle the Comanche on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache
Reservation in southwestern Indian Territory. It’s a very interesting story.
Start here.

Quanah Parker

Kent Smith as Quanah

There's the curious statement by Quanah that the Comanches are not fighting against Americans. "The Comanches are at war only with Mexicans." At the end, when Black Cloud has shot his bolt and peace is made, Dana sonorously pronounces to the Comanche, "My country has pledged its word that our treaty will never be broken by a white." We all know how that went.Good old
George Sherman directed. He was at the helm of many a B-programmer all through
the 1930s and 40s. He’d done another Comanche picture, Comanche Territory, in 1950 (wise Army man makes peace with the Comanche), and had also done one or two
reasonably good Westerns, such as Tomahawk
(wise Army man makes peace with the Sioux) with Van Heflin or The Battle at Apache Passwith Jeff Chandler (wise Army man makes peace with the Apache). He was what you might call a safe pair of hands.

Comanche will not set the prairie on fire but is quite an enjoyable Western, and
the performances of Dana Andrews and Nestor Paiva lift it.Just turn the sound down when the song comes
on.